i'm a pessimist and you should be too

the world is a shitty place home to selfish people, and claiming to be an optimist is an act of privilege

It is impossible to, in earnest, walk through life as an optimist without acknowledging its inherent privilege. Optimism often flourishes where there is stability, safety, and a buffer from the ugliest parts of the world. It’s much easier to “focus on the good” when your rent is paid, your body is safe, and the worst thing in your life is an inconvenience instead of a survival threat.

The world is a clusterfuck of socially inept people, chronic injustice, selfishness—everything is set against you to make you believe there is truly good in the world. That is, unless you are the subset of people who can see the good.

There is a sense of delusion that comes with optimism. Or maybe it’s straight-up naivety. How could you stand to see the good in the world when there is so much bad?:

Palestinian children are dying of starvation.

The United States is deporting individuals without due process and sending them to countries they aren’t from and/or holding them in internment camps.

Humans have directly contributed to a sixth mass extinction event.

Meanwhile, native tribes have lost 99% of their land in the United States, resulting in forced migration.

I refuse to see the good in a world that has done nothing but prove to me that humans are inherently traitorous. We manufacture problems and ignore their solutions. Instead, we funnel more and more hatred, destruction, and pure selfishness down the neck of a bottle we cannot fill any more than we have.

And with optimism comes a reluctance to see the world objectively. Viewing a deteriorating, self-consuming world through the lens of false optimism is harmful.

Of course, there is indeed good in the world. There are people actively fighting and advocating for human rights, campaigning for environmental protections, and putting boots on the ground in war-torn areas to offer relief. That is not lost on me. I raise a hand to and think of these selfless individuals and organizations who put passion over profit, life and love over luxury, to continue to fight.

And here’s where optimism becomes a luxury. It’s far easier to “focus on the good” when the worst of the world’s cruelties exist at a distance from you — when they’re headlines, not lived experiences. For most people, optimism isn’t an act of resilience. It’s an act of insulation.

However, where my pessimism comes in is not the refusal to accept that there is good in the world, but concluding that we’ve come to a point as a collective society where the bad has heavily outweighed the good.

It isn’t solely in terms of humanitarian and environmental issues, either. There are these macro issues that seem like nothing when compared to the atrocities in news articles and on Instagram posts. We’ve entered an era of selfishness.

I recently read an article from Fortune claiming “the age of selfishness is making us sick”. In it, Talia Varley writes:

In the case of COVID-19, it might have even changed people’s personalities as younger adults became more prone to stress, distrust, and even neuroticism with declined agreeableness. This is thought to be due to personality being more malleable in younger age groups and amid changes to the normative tasks of adulthood; for example, transitioning to the workplace and relationship development. And if these changes are enduring in nature, it suggests that population-wide stressful events have the ability to bend the trajectory of personality and behavior for an entire generation.

It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy, isn’t it? How we as humans continue to create problems that spiral into the fracturing of our existence. Selfishness begets more selfishness until it corrodes the very fabric of how we treat each other.

Sure, was COVID a problem we could have prevented? Not necessarily. But it is our (primarily the United States of America’s) reaction (or lack thereof) to traumatic and cataclysmic events that fuel subsequent societal reactions.

War. Famine. Injustice. Environmental collapse.

Many of the causes of these fractures in our lives and world are solely rooted in human selfishness. We’re incapable of seeing the other side, especially now as shadow-oligarchic intolerance has continued to be highlighted in the modern era. And at times, I don’t believe it is a matter of an incapability of seeing the other side of our actions or problems because incapability insinuates there is an inaccessibility. Most humans simply don't care to view the world outside of their selfishness.

It is as though we enjoy creating problems. And to some extent, I think we do. But there is also another facet of this thinking, and it’s that we simply don’t care about the consequences of the problems we create.

It starts by letting a door slam in a closely following grocery store patron’s face. By keeping the twenty-dollar bill that fell from a pedestrian’s pocket. It’s ignoring traffic laws, compromising other people’s safety to get to your destination on time.

These acts of everyday selfishness perpetuate selfishness by nature. And that is where my pessimism is bred.

Optimism asks you to believe those moments are the exception, not the rule—but that belief is easiest to hold if those same selfish acts rarely touch you. If your life isn’t constantly shaped by loss, injustice, or exclusion, you can afford to frame the world in softer focus. That’s not resilience. That’s proximity to comfort.

Instead of choosing to live in comfortable delusion, I’ve chosen the reality that the world is a shitty place and will continue to be one as long as humanity continues to live a life based in selfishness.

Pessimism isn’t a flaw—it’s the only honest way to look at a world that refuses to change. To me, pessimism is not cynicism. It’s clarity—the recognition that optimism is a currency not everyone can afford to spend.

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